Billie Jean King Documentary Gets the Icon Right, Misses a Few Serves

Give Me the Ball! is a watchable portrait of a genuinely transformative figure. It delivers the archive and the talking heads. It doesn't quite deliver the argument.

Billie Jean King's story is one of the rare sports biographies that's actually a political history wearing athletic gear. She didn't just win matches — she rebuilt the economic architecture of women's professional sport from scratch, running a promotion operation while training and competing at the highest level, which is the kind of thing that gets glossed over in hagiography and deserves a full accounting. This documentary does the basics well. King herself is a sharp and lively presence on camera — the vivid red glasses, the wit, the controlled outrage that never tips into bitterness. The archive footage of her playing is as good as it's ever been packaged, and the coverage of the 1973 'Battle of the Sexes' against Bobby Riggs reminds you how completely normalised casual sexism was at the apex of American broadcast television. The clip of Howard Cosell putting his arm around Rosie Casals mid-interview is genuinely jaw-dropping in retrospect — a small moment that lands harder than any narrator could make it. The film is at its most interesting when it treats King as an operator, not just an athlete. The Virginia Slims women's tour was a commercial revolution — built from nothing, against institutional resistance, requiring King to sell the product at the same time she was the product. The film gestures at this complexity but doesn't quite dig into the machinery. How did that sponsorship model actually work? What were the specific battles inside the USTA? The documentary has the footage; it doesn't always have the analysis to match. The personal material is handled with appropriate weight. Larry King's inadvertent revelation of his wife's abortion in 1972 — without her knowledge or consent — is given the gravity it deserves, as is the Marilyn Barnett 'galimony' lawsuit of the early 1980s that forced King's sexuality into public view before she was ready. These weren't just personal ordeals; they were imposed exposures, and the film is honest about the coercion involved. Larry King's presence as an interviewee is quietly poignant — the documentary seems to understand that his devotion was real and complicated and doesn't flatten it. The notable absence is male contemporaries. The reviewer's observation that no male tennis player — not even the invariably available John McEnroe — appears to praise King's significance is a real gap. It's not fatal, but it narrows the film. King's impact on the sport as a whole, not just on women's tennis, was substantial. That the documentary apparently couldn't secure a single male voice on record is either a production failure or a symptom of a problem the film should have named explicitly. Against Chris and Martina: The Final Set, which the same production context invites us to compare, Give Me the Ball! is marginally less sharp in its structural analysis and roughly equivalent in its use of the subject's own candour. Both films benefit enormously from their subjects being willing to actually say things on camera. King, at 82, has clearly decided she's past the point of careful image management, and the film is better for it. This is a documentary you'd recommend to anyone who cares about the history of professional sport, feminist organising, or American cultural politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is not, however, the definitive King film. That film would need to treat the Virginia Slims tour with the seriousness of a business history, and would find at least one male voice willing to say publicly what the sport owes her. What's here is good. It could have been essential.